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After California: What the state’s water crisis means for Canada’s food security

This is a little different from what I usually post, but is most important to life, WATER. We take water for granted in the US. Maybe we shouldn’t, especially Californians. I lived in Southern California for over 20 years and now live in KY where rain is plentiful.

For years, Canadians have been eating their share of California’s apparently endless abundance. California farm products, mostly vegetables but also nuts and fruit, feed millions of Canadians. Last year, Canada imported C$2.7 billion worth of California produce, or 1.2 billion kilograms of everything from figs to persimmons.

When the water hole dries up, the saying goes, the animals look at each other differently.

California’s water crisis, which is much more far-reaching than something that could just be described as a drought, is as good an illustration as any.

There is a drought, certainly. California has had little rainfall, or snowfall to renew the mountain glaciers that fill the state’s rivers in better times, since 2012.

California’s vanishing snowpack

Between January, 2013 and January, 2014, snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains virtually disappeared. The Central Valley, California’s farming breadbasket – and source of much of Canada’s fresh produce, especially in winter – looks much drier in the 2014 image.